WHO still a cat’s paw for China

Joe Biden made much of his determination to “strengthen and reform” the WHO when he made an immediate US return to the world’s premier health body one of his first priorities as president.

The week-long session of the 194-nation World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making global “parliament,” which ended on Tuesday, showed Mr Biden still has a long way to go if he does want to see real change in the WHO and an end to its slavish indulgence of China’s malign influence.

It showed that within the counsels of the WHO, with Syria’s notorious Bashar al-Assad regime and Belarus’s monstrous Alexander Lukashenko dictatorship incredibly elected to the world body’s 34-nation executive board responsible for its management, China’s CCP remains powerfully positioned to block any serious investigation of Covid-19’s origins.

In July 2020, when he announced he was withdrawing the US from membership and Washington’s role as the WHO’s generous provider of far and away the biggest slice of its budget ($US616.5 million since January 2020), Donald Trump did not mince his words. He cited China’s “total control” for doing so. Amid the global controversy over the pandemic’s Wuhan origins and Beijing’s gross mishandling of it, Mr Trump denounced the WHO, saying, “they’re a puppet of China.”

Whatever hope there may have been that at the World Health Assembly there would be an indication Mr Biden was making headway in achieving reform was clearly misplaced.

Even before the Assembly, US attempts – backed by the G7 and other Western nations – to get even observer status for Taiwan, one of the countries that has been most successful in dealing with the pandemic, came to nothing. They were stymied by Beijing.

Taiwan’s participation in the Assembly was a crucial test for both the US and China. For weeks, Washington lobbied strenuously for WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has close Beijing links, to invite Taiwan. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared there was “no reasonable justification for Taiwan’s continued exclusion”. Taiwan, he pointed out, offered “valuable contributions and lessons” learned from its successful handling of the pandemic. “WHO leadership and all responsible nations should recognise that excluding the interests of 24 million people at the Assembly serves only to imperil, not advance, our shared global health objectives,” he added.

China’s predictable, febrile response was to declare the US/ G7 efforts “gross interference in Chinese sovereignty” and “anachronistic block politics”. It mobilised support among WHO members to ensure Taiwan was not invited.

Nothing better demonstrates that despite its own mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic through its toadying attitude towards Beijing, the WHO has done nothing to mend its ways.

If anything, the election of China-friendly dictatorships such as Syria and Belarus to the WHO’s top executive board, which sets the Assembly’s agenda and implements its policies, suggests Beijing may have enhanced its influence. The Assad regime has spent a decade slaughtering its own people and bombing hospitals, while Lukashenko’s regime, among its other outrages, hijacked a civilian passenger aircraft last week to arrest a critic.

Mr Biden is not the first US president to want to reverse a predecessor’s policies.

But with China having used its influence to exclude democratic Taiwan, and dreadful dictatorships such as Syria’s and Belarus’s now on the executive board, even he must wonder whether Mr Trump’s decision to turn his back on the WHO was perhaps right.

Allowing the WHO to continue playing the role of malign China’s catspaw over the origins and spread of the pandemic’s devastation would be a serious mistake.